The analysis of the story by former people is bitter. Maxim Gorky - former people

Gorky Maxim

Former people

M. Gorky

Former people

The entrance street consists of two rows of one-story shacks, closely pressed together, dilapidated, with crooked walls and skewed windows; the leaky roofs of human dwellings, mutilated by time, are covered with patches of splints and overgrown with moss; Here and there high poles with birdhouses stick out above them, they are overshadowed by the dusty greenery of elderberries and gnarled willows - the pitiful flora of the city outskirts inhabited by the poor.

The glass windows of the houses, dull green with age, look at each other with the eyes of cowardly swindlers. In the middle of the street it's crawling uphill winding track, maneuvering between deep ruts, washed out by rain. Here and there lie heaps of rubble and various debris overgrown with weeds - these are the remains or beginnings of those structures that were unsuccessfully undertaken by ordinary people in the fight against the streams of rainwater that was rapidly flowing from the city. Above, on the mountain, beautiful stone houses are hidden in the lush greenery of dense gardens, the bell towers of churches rise proudly into the blue sky, their golden crosses sparkle dazzlingly in the sun.

When it rains, the city releases its dirt onto Vezzhaya Street, and when it’s dry, it showers it with dust - and all these ugly houses also seem to have been thrown from there, from above, swept away like garbage by someone’s mighty hand.

Flattened to the ground, they dotted the entire mountain, half-rotten, weak, painted by the sun, dust and rain in that grayish-dirty color that a tree takes on in old age.

At the end of this street, thrown out of the city downhill, stood the long, two-story escheated house of the merchant Petunnikov. He is the last one in order, he is already under the mountain, further behind him there is a wide field, cut off half a mile by a steep cliff to the river.

Big, an old house had the gloomiest face among his neighbors. It was all crooked, in two rows of its windows there was not a single one that retained the correct shape, and the glass fragments in the broken frames had the greenish-muddy color of swamp water.

The walls between the windows were dotted with cracks and dark spots of fallen plaster - as if time had written his biography on the walls of the house in hieroglyphs. The roof, sloping towards the street, further increased its deplorable appearance; it seemed as if the house was bent to the ground and was meekly awaiting the final blow from fate, which would turn it into a shapeless pile of half-rotten rubble.

The gate is open - one half of it, torn from its hinges, lies on the ground, and in the gap, between its boards, grass has sprouted, thickly covering the large, deserted courtyard of the house. In the depths of the courtyard there is a low, smoky building with a single-slope iron roof. The house itself is uninhabited, but in this building, formerly a blacksmith shop, there was now a “night shelter” maintained by retired captain Aristide Fomich Kuvalda.

Inside the shelter is a long, gloomy hole, four and six fathoms in size; it was lit - only on one side - by four small windows and a wide door. Its brick, unplastered walls are black with soot, the ceiling, from a baroque bottom, is also smoked black; in the middle of it there was a huge stove, the base of which was a forge, and around the stove and along the walls there were wide bunks with piles of all sorts of junk that served as beds for the night shelters. The walls smelled of smoke, the earthen floor smelled of damp, and the bunks smelled of rotting rags.

The room of the owner of the shelter was located on the stove, the bunks around the stove were a place of honor, and those shelters who enjoyed the favor and friendship of the owner were placed on them.

The captain always spent the day at the door to the lodging house, sitting in some semblance of an armchair, which he himself built from bricks, or in Yegor Vavilov’s tavern, located diagonally from Petunnikov’s house; there the captain dined and drank vodka.

Before renting this premises, Aristide Hammer had an office in the city for the recommendation of servants; going higher into his past, one could find out that he had a printing house, and before the printing house he, in his words, “simply lived! And he lived gloriously, damn it! He lived skillfully, I can say!”

It was broad-shouldered A tall man about fifty years old, with a pockmarked face, swollen from drunkenness, and a wide, dirty yellow beard. His eyes are gray, huge, and boldly cheerful; He spoke in a deep voice, with a rumble in his throat, and almost always a German porcelain pipe with a curved stem stuck out in his teeth. When he was angry, the nostrils of his large, humpbacked, red nose flared wide and his lips quivered, revealing two rows of large, wolf-like yellow teeth. Long-armed, lanky-legged, dressed in a dirty and torn officer's overcoat, in a greasy cap with a red band but without a visor, in thin felt boots that reached his knees - in the morning he was invariably in a severe state of hangover, and in the evening he was tipsy. He could not get drunk, no matter how much he drank, and he never lost his cheerful mood.

In the evenings, sitting in his brick chair with a pipe in his mouth, he received guests.

What kind of person? - he asked a ragged and depressed person approaching him, thrown out of the city for drunkenness or for some other good reason who had fallen down.

The man answered.

Provide legal paper to support your lies.

The paper was presented if there was one. The captain put it in his bosom, rarely interested in its contents, and said:

Everything is fine. For a night - two kopecks, for a week - a kopeck, for a month - three kopecks. Go and find a place for yourself, but make sure it’s not someone else’s, otherwise they’ll blow you up. People living with me are strict...

Newcomers asked him:

Don’t you sell tea, bread or anything edible?

I only sell walls and roofs, for which I myself pay the swindler owner of this hole, the merchant of the 2nd guild Judas Petunnikov, five rubles a month,” Kuvald explained in a businesslike tone, “people come to me, unaccustomed to luxury... and if you I’m used to eating every day - there’s a tavern across the street. But it’s better if you, a wreck, unlearn this bad habit. After all, you are not a gentleman - so what do you eat? Eat yourself!

For such speeches, delivered in an artificially stern tone, but always with laughing eyes, for his attentive attitude towards his guests, the captain enjoyed wide popularity among the city goli. It often happened that former client The captain came to his yard no longer torn and depressed, but in more or less decent appearance and with a cheerful face.

Hello, your honor! How are you doing?

Did not recognize?

Did not recognize.

Do you remember that I lived with you for about a month in the winter... when there was a raid and three people were taken away?

Well, brother, the police are under my hospitable roof every now and then!

Oh, my God! Back then you showed the private bailiff a fig!

Wait, you spit on memories and just say what you need?

Alyosha Peshkov, left an orphan, was sent by his grandfather “to the people” - to work for strangers. He ended up in the store fashionable shoes together with his brother Sasha. He used his seniority to humiliate him once again. Alyosha got up early, cleaned everyone's clothes and shoes, brought firewood, and set up the samovar.

In the store he swept the floor, made tea, went home for lunch, but his main duty was to greet customers. He didn’t want to stand there with a smile glued on, like the clerks, and Sasha insisted that he would be “persecuted” for this.

Alyosha did not like the cook, a “strange woman,” but after her unexpected death he became close to Sasha, who was afraid of the dead. Sasha showed him his chest and took him to the “chapel” that he had built for the sparrow he had strangled, so that it would become a saint and relics would be obtained from its body. Alyosha was shocked and, in a fit of violence, threw everything out of the cave and filled it up, but Sasha threatened with witchcraft, which began in the morning: there were needles in all the boots. Alyosha pricked his finger and began to imagine a dead sparrow.

The boy decided to run away, but knocked over a bowl of hot cabbage soup onto his hands and ended up in the hospital. He felt bad, his hands burned and vomited; he wanted to write a letter to his grandmother and run away, but a soldier he knew calmed him down. He told his grandmother, and she took Alyosha home in the morning.

II.

Grandfather’s life got worse - he went broke. The grandmother atoned for sins by delivering “quiet alms” with Alyosha at night, when no one was looking.
There is sad news on the street: Wood Pigeon has died, Khabi has gone to the city, and Yazy’s legs are paralyzed. Kostroma said that there were new neighbors whose daughter was lame, but very beautiful, because of her he and Churka were fighting.

Alyosha met her, trying to hand her crutches with bandaged hands. Then they became friends, read together, Alyosha even helped her around the house. Grandmother encouraged this friendship.

Kostroma told about the hunter Kalinin, who was not buried after death, but was left in a black coffin, and now he allegedly rises from the coffin every night. The shopkeeper's son offered to sit on the coffin until the morning for two kopecks. Churka volunteered, but was scared, and Alyosha agreed. Grandmother said to read prayers. The boy even managed to fall asleep. As a result, he became a “hero” of the street.

III.

Brother Kolya died. Grandmother said: good, otherwise I would have suffered all my life. Yazya's father dug a grave next to his mother, but touched the coffin. Alyosha saw this, felt a heavy smell - he felt bad.

Grandfather went to the forest to get firewood, and grandmother to get herbs. Alyosha helped his grandfather, but ran to his grandmother and watched as she walked through the forest like a mistress, seeing everything and praising everyone.
They began to go to the forest every day. One day Alyosha fell into an empty bear den and cut his side, but his grandmother healed him. Another time he saw a dog, which turned out to be a wolf. And one day a hunter accidentally shot a shot into the boy. Grandma liked that he endured pain.

In the fall, his grandfather sent him to Matryona, his grandmother’s sister, so that Alyosha could become a draftsman.

IV.

Alyosha was once here with his mother. Matryona was loud. Her sons are completely different. The eldest is married. The women in the family fought, they only cared about food and sleep. The owners considered themselves the best in the city and discussed everything, which irritated Alyosha. Work became his salvation, but there was no time to study the art of drawing. The grandmother really hoped that he would be paid for his work.

On weekends we went to church. Alyosha was afraid of confession, but confessed to all his sins. Father Dorimedont forgave everything, not attaching any importance to the gravity of his deed. Alyosha left, feeling deceived, and then lost the money for communion. At the same time, he loved the Mother of God with all his heart, according to his grandmother’s stories, and when they brought the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir to the house, he kissed her on the lips and waited for a long time for punishment from above.

V.

In the spring he ran away from his relatives, but did not go to his grandmother. He was advised to go as a cook on a ship. His grandfather gave him his passport, and Alyosha was taken on the Dobry ship. He didn't like the cook, but he fed him well.

Alyosha couldn’t sleep at night: he was worried about the beauty of the night. He looked at the barge with the prisoners, which was sailing in tow behind him, and recalled how he was traveling from Astrakhan with his mother and grandmother. The ship moved slowly, all the passengers seemed the same. They ate all the time and dirty a lot of dishes: they had to wash all day.

The cook was nicknamed Smury. His assistant Yakov spoke only about women and always dirty. There was also a dishwasher, Maxim, and a waiter, Sergei. Smury learned that Alyosha could read and began giving him books to read aloud. Sometimes he even took me away from work, and Maxim had to do more dishes - he got angry and broke glasses.

The listeners often quarreled, but they were afraid of Smury: he did not get drunk, had superhuman strength, and the captain’s wife often talked to him. She gave him a volume of Gogol, and the cook liked the story “Taras Bulba”: he even cried.

The barmaid didn't like the fact that Alyosha was reading and not working. One day, drunken Sergei and Maxim dragged the boy to “marry” a tipsy woman. Smury took Alyosha away and said bitterly that he would disappear in this “herd of pigs.”

VI.

Soon Maxim left the ship, and a Vyatka soldier was taken in his place. He was sent to slaughter chickens, he scattered them across the deck, and then burst into tears. The passengers mocked him: they tied a spoon behind him and laughed wildly. Alyosha wondered painfully why people were cruel.

One day something burst in the car. This caused panic among the passengers. Alyosha saw this three times over the summer, and each time the panic was caused not by danger, but by fear of it. The third time they caught two thieves and beat them senseless.

All this tormented the boy, and he began to ask Smurny. He advised me to read books: in them people did the right thing. Alyosha was convinced that the cook was well versed in books. Smury believed that Alyosha needed to study. Soon the boy was paid for allowing Sergei to carry dishes and sell them to passengers. As a farewell gift, Smury gave a beaded pouch.

VII.

When Alyosha returned, he felt like an adult and lit a cigarette. The grandfather did not like this, and they quarreled. The grandmother jokingly patted Alyosha to reassure the grandfather - he was as pleased as a child.

Alexey decided to start catching birds. It has become profitable business, but I liked the feeling of freedom more. Hunting passion and the desire to earn money overcame pity for the birds.

Grandfather believed: you have to become one of the people. It seemed to Alyosha that Cossacks and soldiers lived best. He ran with the soldiers on exercises, they treated him to shag, but one day they slipped him a cigarette, which burned his face and hands. This greatly offended the boy. But later he experienced something more amazing.

Alyosha witnessed a scene when one Cossack, having gotten drunk in a tavern, tricked a woman into the street, and then beat her and raped her. He also boasted that a Cossack will always take what he needs. Alyosha thought with horror that this could happen to his mother or grandmother.

VIII.

When the snow fell, Alyosha was again sent to Matryona. The owners' boredom became worse. He lived in a fog of stultifying melancholy and worked harder to overcome it. Now he went to the key to rinse clothes with the laundresses. They ridiculed him, but then they got used to it.

They knew the life of the city well, and it was interesting to listen to their stories. Alexey often heard boastful and deceitful stories from men about victories over women. And women spoke about men mockingly, but without boasting.

IN free time he chopped wood in the barn, where the orderlies came. Alyosha wrote letters to them in the villages, notes to his lovers. They told a story about the cutter's wife. She read books and went to the library twice a week. And the officers started with her evil game: wrote her love notes. She answered them, asked them to leave them alone, and they read her answers and laughed.

Alyosha told her everything, she gave him a silver coin, but he didn’t take it. Then for a long time I remembered the bright room and the woman in a blue dress. He came to ask for a book and became interested in reading. The owners noticed that a lot of candles were now being burned, and then they discovered the book. I had to lie that it was a priest’s book.

IX.

Afraid of spoiling expensive books, began to take them from the shopkeeper for a penny per reading. If the owner found them, she tore them to shreds. Alyosha owed money to the shopkeeper and wanted to steal money from Victor’s pocket, but he couldn’t. I told him about the debt, and Victor gave him fifty dollars, but asked him not to take books from the store, it was better to subscribe to a good newspaper in the new year.

In the evenings, Alyosha began reading “Moscow Leaflet” to his owners. He did not like to read aloud, but they listened with reverence. Then he suggested reading thick magazines that had been lying in the bedroom for a long time. I felt my understanding of the world around me expanding. During Lent, reading was prohibited, and Alyosha became lethargic and lazy, because there was no incentive to finish his work quickly.

Once the child pulled the tap out of the samovar, all the water flowed out, and the samovar came apart. Alexei got it for this: the old woman beat him with a bunch of pine splinters. It didn't hurt, but there were a lot of splinters left. I didn’t complain to the doctor, for which everyone in the family was grateful and allowed me to borrow books from the cutter. So he managed to read good French novels, but there was a lot about love. People in the yard spoke increasingly worse about the cutter, and in the spring she left.

X.

A young woman with her daughter and old mother settled in the house. The lady was beautiful, and Alyosha involuntarily compared her with the heroines historical novels. She was constantly surrounded by men.

Alyosha became friends with his daughter: she fell asleep in his arms when he told a fairy tale. The girl's mother wanted to give something, but refused. Then she began to give him books. She introduced me to fairy tales and poems by Pushkin, poems by Russian poets, and Alyosha realized that poetry is richer than prose in expressing feelings.

He could not express his feelings for the young lady. The boy called her Queen Margot to himself. She lived in a cloud of hostility towards her, but Alyosha was sure that those vulgarities that speak of love did not concern her. One day I found her with a man and felt lost for several days. Books saved.

Before Trinity, the eyelids swelled, and everyone was afraid that Alyosha would go blind. His eyelids were cut from the inside, he lay with a bandage and thought how terrible it was to lose his sight. Then he was wrongly accused of stealing money from a soldier, and he never had to see Queen Margot again.

XI.

Again a crockery worker on the Perm steamship, earning 7 rubles a month. This time the cook, nicknamed Teddy Bear, is a dandy, small, plump one. The most interesting person on the ship is the fireman Yakov Shumov. He constantly played cards, and in the evenings he told stories to himself. He surprised Alyosha with his gluttony. At the same time, he is always calm, even if the captain scolded him.

Money amused Yakov, but he was not greedy. Taught Alyosha to play cards. Alexey turned out to be so hot that he lost five rubles, a shirt and new boots. Yakov said angrily that he couldn’t play, returned everything, and took a ruble for himself for his science.

What was repulsive about Jacob was his indifference to people. Others considered him harmless, but to Alyosha he seemed like a locked chest. Yakov even conveyed his stories without any feelings. And Alyosha briefly told him everything he had read in books, putting it together into an endless story. In the fall, the fireman went to Perm with some stranger, remaining a mystery to the hero.

XII.

Alyosha was given an icon painting workshop. The hostess said that you can study in the evening, but during the day you need to sell icons in the shop. Together with the clerk, they invited customers, but for some reason many went to a neighboring shop. There sounded the sweet voice and stupefying speech of the clerk - you had to learn this.

Often icons and ancient books were bought from old people for next to nothing. Alyosha felt sorry for them, because they were then sold to rich Old Believers for tens of times more. The cost was assessed by the accountant Pyotr Vasilievich. He crossed himself, arousing respect from the believers, but spoke to the clerk in a special language so that they would not understand the deception.

This wiry old man was somewhat reminiscent of Yakov Shumov. He deceived people, but had a warm relationship with God. There were other cheaters, they even fought with each other for profit. As a result, Alyosha understood the truth of life: you cannot run away from life.

XIII.

In the icon-painting workshop they sang drawn-out songs while they worked. The creation of painting on an icon was divided into stages: one could see the icon without a face or hands, which was unpleasant.
Painting was done different people, but everyone obeyed Larionich. Some people needed songs for creativity. And Zhikharev, the best artist, after finishing the icon, went on a drinking binge: he brought snacks, beer and wine to the workshop. And after the feast, the dancing began - Russian, daring. Don Cossack Kapendyukhin resembled the Gypsy with his dance.

XIV.

Everyone in the workshop was illiterate, and Alyosha read aloud every evening. Sometimes he was amazed at the difference between a book and life. In the books there were no people like those who surrounded him in Lately. It was difficult to get books - Alyosha begged for them everywhere as alms.

He became friends with Pavel Odintsov, and together they tried to entertain the artisans - they put on plays and made them laugh. Another entertainment was fist fights. Kapendyukhin could not defeat the Mordvin - he put lead in his gloves. Sitanov did not allow the killing and entered the fight himself. He won not by strength, but by dexterity.

People talked a lot about God, but when Alyosha and Pavel washed the dying Davidov in the bathhouse, they were laughed at: he would soon die anyway.

XV.

On his name day, Alyosha was given an icon with the image of Alexy. But the mood was immediately spoiled by another clash with the clerk. He constantly mocked the boy, gave him dirty work, threw silver money at him to catch him stealing, and humiliated him in the eyes of others. I reported the slightest offense to the owner.

There was no support from my grandfather, my grandmother worked all the time, and during rare meetings she urged me to endure. But Alyosha was not given patience; he thought with horror that he would continue to flounder in some dirty mess.

He decided to go to Astrakhan and from there escape to Persia. I met the former owner Vasily, my grandmother’s nephew. He called to him. In the workshop, the news of his departure was received with sadness, especially by Pavel. And the hostess drunkenly declared that if he had not left, he would have been kicked out.

XVI.

The shopping arcades were flooded all the time, and new shops were built every year. Alyosha drove the owner’s boat around and read a lot in his free time. The owner talked about his first love very sadly, without boasting. And Alyosha, having fallen in love with the young lady Ptitsyna, wanted to ride a board on the pond, but the board turned over, and the green mud of the pond destroyed the beauty of the young lady.

Stepfather Maximov began to help the owner. He was sick, but he ate a lot, and this annoyed his owners, because he was doomed. I spoke to Alyosha on a first-name basis. He did not believe in God and before his death he did not allow him to bring a priest. I advised Alyosha to go to school. In the hospital, I saw a crying girl at my stepfather’s bed, but I didn’t come to the funeral and never saw her again.

XVII.

Every day Alyosha worked at the Fair, where he met with interesting people. I liked the plasterer Shishlin the most, I even asked to join his artel. In the meantime, Alyosha’s duties included making sure that people did not steal materials from the construction site. He was embarrassed that he was still young, but Osip supported him.

They paid little money, and Alyosha lived from hand to mouth. The workers fed him. Sometimes he would spend the night right at the construction site, and he and the workers would talk. Efimushka spoke mainly about women, Gregory - about God. Alyosha read “The Carpenter’s Artel” to the men; many were touched by the events described, and they discussed it all night.

XVIII.

Now Osip occupied Alyosha's imagination most of all. He seemed smarter than many people and was captivating with his strength of character. Foma also stood out. He knew how to make others work, but he himself worked without desire. Once he was going to become a monk, then he wanted to get married successfully, but he went to a tavern as a sex worker. His former comrades despised him, and four years later he was arrested for burglary.

“Former People” by Gorky M.Yu.

The essay “Former People” was published in 1897, and it was based on Gorky’s youthful impressions when future writer was forced to live in a rooming house on one of the outlying streets of Kazan from June to October 1885. The reality of impressions determines genre originality works: before us is an artistic essay, where the main subject of the image is the life of homeless people, tramps, “former people” at its final and, probably, most tragic stage. The essay genre presupposes underdevelopment storylines, lack of deep psychological analysis, preference portrait characteristics research inner world personality, almost complete lack of backstory for the characters.

If the main subject of depiction in a physiological sketch was not so much specific characters as social roles heroes (St. Petersburg janitor, St. Petersburg organ grinder, Moscow merchants, officials, cab drivers), then in artistic essay Gorky's main attention is focused on the study of the characters of the heroes, united by their current social status“former” people who found themselves at the bottom of their lives - in a shelter run by the same “former” person, retired captain Aristide Kuvalda.

In “Former People” there is no image of an autobiographical hero familiar to the writer - the narrator tries, as it were, to distance himself from what is happening and not to reveal his presence, therefore his ideological and compositional role here is different than in romantic stories or in the cycle “Across Rus'”. He is not the interlocutor of the heroes, their listener, and generally does not turn out to be a character in the work. Only the details of the portrait of “an absurd young man, nicknamed Sledgehammer Meteor” (“The guy was some kind of long-haired, with a stupid, high-cheekboned face, adorned with an upturned nose. He was wearing a blue blouse without a belt, and the rest of a straw hat stuck out on his head. His feet were bare.”) , and most importantly, the characteristics of his attitude towards others (“Then they got used to him and stopped noticing him. But he lived among them and noticed everything”) give us reason to see in him the features of an autobiographical hero, who, however, is distanced from the narrator.

But the main thing that determines the difference between “Former people” and early stories, is the author’s transition from the romantic interpretation folk character to realistic.

The subject of Gorky’s depiction is still images of people from the people, but turning to realistic aesthetics allows the writer to show much more clearly the inconsistency of the people’s character, the contrast between the strong and weak, light and dark sides of it. This inconsistency turns out to be the subject of study in Gorky’s essay.

The turn to realism also marks a change artistic means comprehension of reality.

If the romantic landscape is in early stories Gorky emphasized the exclusivity of the characters’ characters, and the beauty and spirituality of the southern night, the vastness of the free steppe, the horror of the hopeless forest could serve as a backdrop for the revelation romantic hero who affirms his ideal at the cost own life, then now the writer turns to a realistic landscape. He captures its anti-aesthetic features, the ugliness of the city outskirts; poverty, dimness, cloudiness color range are designed to create a feeling of remoteness and abandonment of the habitat of the night shelters: “The glass windows of the houses, cloudy green with age, look at each other with the eyes of cowardly swindlers. In the middle of the street, a winding track creeps up the mountain, maneuvering between deep ruts, washed out by the rains. Here and there there are heaps of rubble and various debris overgrown with weeds.” The description of the uninhabited house of the merchant Petunnikov and the lodging house, located in a former forge, set the context of the typical circumstances that shape the consciousness of the heroes.

Deprived of the romantic aura with which he was shrouded in Gorky’s first stories, the character of the tramp in “Former People” appeared in all his pitiful helplessness before life. The realist approach showed that these people cannot oppose anything to their tragic fate, at least the romantic ideal of freedom, like Makar Chudra, or love, like Izergil. Unlike romantic heroes, they do not even feed themselves with a romantic illusion. They do not carry within themselves some ideal that could be opposed to reality. Therefore, even having risen a little, having taken a step from the shelter, they return back, simply drinking away what they have earned together with Aristide Hammer, a former intellectual, now a poor philosopher and the owner of their monastery. This is exactly what happens with a teacher.

Gorky is far from idealizing tramping. “In general, the Russian tramp,” he wrote in one of his letters, “is a more terrible phenomenon than I was able to say, this person is terrible first of all and most importantly - with his imperturbable despair, with the fact that he denies himself, casts himself out of life.” Indeed, the most terrible accusation that Gorky makes against the inhabitants of the shelter is complete indifference to themselves and passivity in relation to their own fate. “I am... a former person,” Aristide Sledgehammer proudly declares himself. “Now I don’t give a damn about everything and everyone... and my whole life is a mistress who abandoned me, for which I despise her.”

It is precisely this attitude to life, and not just the social position at its “bottom” that are united by “ former people" Aristide Sledgehammer becomes their ideologist, and his philosophically helpless maxims represent the full outline of the ideology that a flophouse can create. “A former intellectual, he has one more feature,” wrote one of the first critics of the essay, L. Nedolin, “he knows how to formulate those moods that nest in the heads of ordinary tramps, without finding expression for themselves.” Realizing the meaninglessness of complete self-denial (“As a former person, I I must reconcile within myself all the feelings and thoughts that were once mine... But what do I and all of you - what will we arm ourselves with if we throw away these feelings? some new ideology, which we are not able to articulate: “We need something different, different views on life, different feelings... we need something new... because we are new in life...”.

But if in the drama of Gorky Luk something can be contrasted with the indifference to the own “I” of Baron or Bubnov, then for “former people” pessimism and passivity in relation to life turn out to be the most accessible philosophy.

“Does it matter what you say and think,” asks the End. “We don’t have long to live... I’m forty, you’re fifty... there’s no one among us younger than thirty.” And even at twenty you won’t live such a life for long.” His laughter, “bad, corroding the soul” and infectious for his comrades, turns out to be the only possible emotional reaction on one’s own position in life, below which there is no longer anything. “The end says, as if hitting heads with a hammer:

“All this is nonsense, dreams, nonsense!”

This despair was especially hateful to Gorky, who valued action in man, the ability for his own growth, internal, difficult, painstaking work self-improvement. Therefore, the “continuously growing man” became the ideal of the writer. Despair gives rise to anger, which, finding no way out, falls upon one’s neighbor:

“And suddenly brutal anger flared up among them, the bitterness of the driven people, exhausted by their harsh fate, awakened. Then they beat each other; they beat me cruelly, brutally; they beat and again, having made peace, got drunk, drinking everything away... So, in dull anger, in the melancholy that squeezed their hearts, in ignorance of the outcome from this vile life, they spent the days of autumn, waiting for the even harsher days of winter.”

Gorky is trying to understand how great the personal, social, and universal potential of “former people” is, whether they, finding themselves in unbearable social and living conditions, are able to preserve certain intangible, spiritual and spiritual values that could be opposed to a world that is unfair to them. This aspect of the essay’s problems determines the uniqueness of the conflict.

The conflict is clearly expressed social character: “former people” led by Aristide Kuvalda are revealed in confrontation with the merchant Petunnikov and his son, an educated, strong, cold and intelligent representative of the second generation of the Russian bourgeoisie.

Gorky is not so interested in social aspect confrontation, as much as the unwillingness of the heroes to really comprehend their position, their needs, possible prospects. They are not interested in someone else's land on which the Petunnikovs built a house, or even in the money they expect to receive. This is just a spontaneous manifestation of the hatred of a poor drunkard towards a rich and hard-working person. Gorky characterizes the worldview of “former” people this way:

“Evil had a lot of attractions in the eyes of these people. It was the only weapon in terms of hand and strength. Each of them had long ago cultivated in himself a semi-conscious, vague feeling of acute hostility towards all people who were well-fed and not dressed in rags; each of them had this feeling in different degrees its development."

Gorky's essay shows the complete futility of such life position. Complete absence any creativity, activity, internal growth, dynamics of self-improvement (qualities that were so important for Gorky the artist and manifested in the hero autobiographical trilogy, in the novel “Mother”), the inability to oppose reality with anything other than anger inevitably leads to the “bottom” and turns this anger against the “former” people themselves. Experiencing their defeat in the conflict, the heroes cannot comprehend it otherwise than in Sledgehammer’s maxim: “Yes, life is all against us, my brothers, scoundrels! And even when you spit in your neighbor’s face, the spit flies back into your own eyes.”

It seems that Gorky, having taken a realistic position, is unable to find a way to resolve the conflict between the high destiny of man and the tragic unfulfillment of it in “former” people. Its irresistibility forces the writer in the final landscape to return to the romantic worldview and only in nature, in the elements, to see a beginning that can provide some way out, to find a solution to the insoluble:

“There was something tense and inexorable in the gray, stern clouds that completely covered the sky, as if they, about to burst into a downpour, had firmly decided to wash away all the dirt from this unfortunate, exhausted, sad earth.”

I

The entrance street consists of two rows of one-story shacks, closely pressed together, dilapidated, with crooked walls and skewed windows; the leaky roofs of human dwellings, mutilated by time, are covered with patches of splints and overgrown with moss; Here and there high poles with birdhouses stick out above them, they are overshadowed by the dusty greenery of elderberry and gnarled willows - the pitiful flora of the city outskirts inhabited by the poor.

The glass windows of the houses, dull green with age, look at each other with the eyes of cowardly swindlers. In the middle of the street, a winding track creeps up the mountain, maneuvering between deep ruts, washed out by the rains. Here and there lie heaps of rubble and various debris overgrown with weeds - these are the remains or beginnings of those structures that were unsuccessfully undertaken by ordinary people in the fight against the streams of rainwater that was rapidly flowing from the city. Above, on the mountain, beautiful stone houses are hidden in the lush greenery of dense gardens, the bell towers of churches proudly rise into the blue sky, their golden crosses sparkle dazzlingly in the sun.

When it rains, the city releases its dirt onto Vezzhaya Street, and when it’s dry, it showers it with dust—and all these ugly houses also seem to have been thrown from there, from above, swept away like garbage by someone’s mighty hand.

Flattened to the ground, they dotted the entire mountain, half-rotten, weak, painted by the sun, dust and rain in that grayish-dirty color that a tree takes on in old age.

At the end of this street, thrown out of the city downhill, stood the long two-story escheat house of the merchant Petunnikov. He is the last one in order, he is already under the mountain, further behind him there is a wide field, cut off half a mile by a steep cliff to the river.

The big old house had the gloomiest face among its neighbors. It was all crooked, in two rows of windows there was not a single one that retained the correct shape, and the glass fragments in the broken frames had the greenish-muddy color of swamp water.

The walls between the windows were dotted with cracks and dark spots of fallen plaster - as if time had written his biography on the walls of the house in hieroglyphs. The roof, sloping towards the street, further increased its deplorable appearance - it seemed that the house was bent to the ground and was meekly awaiting the final blow from fate, which would turn it into a shapeless pile of half-rotten rubble.

Inside the shelter is a long, gloomy hole, four and six fathoms in size; it was lit - only on one side - by four small windows and a wide door. Its brick, unplastered walls are black with soot, the ceiling, from the baroque bottom, is also smoked black; in the middle of it there was a huge stove, the base of which was a forge, and around the stove and along the walls there were wide bunks with piles of all sorts of junk that served as beds for the bunkhouses. The walls smelled of smoke, the earthen floor smelled of damp, and the bunks smelled of rotting rags.

Before renting this premises, Aristide Hammer had an office in the city for the recommendation of servants; going higher into his past, one could find out that he had a printing house, and before the printing house he, in his words, “simply lived!” And he lived well, damn it! I lived skillfully, I can say!”

He was a broad-shouldered, tall man of about fifty, with a pockmarked face, swollen from drunkenness, and a wide, dirty yellow beard. His eyes are gray, huge, and boldly cheerful; He spoke in a deep voice, with a rumble in his throat, and almost always a German porcelain pipe with a curved stem stuck out in his teeth. When he was angry, the nostrils of his large, humpbacked, red nose would flare wide and his lips would quiver, revealing two rows of large, wolf-like yellow teeth. Long-armed, lanky-legged, dressed in a dirty and torn officer's overcoat, in a greasy cap with a red band but without a visor, in thin felt boots that reached his knees - in the morning he was invariably in a severe state of hangover, and in the evening - tipsy. He could not get drunk, no matter how much he drank, and he never lost his cheerful mood.

In the evenings, sitting in his brick chair with a pipe in his mouth, he received guests.

- What kind of person? - he asked a ragged and depressed person approaching him, thrown out of the city for drunkenness or for some other good reason who had fallen down.

The man answered.

- Present legal paper to confirm your lies.

The paper was presented if there was one. The captain put it in his bosom, rarely interested in its contents, and said:

- Everything is fine. For a night - two kopecks, for a week - a kopeck, for a month - three kopecks. Go and take a seat for yourself, but make sure it’s not someone else’s, otherwise they’ll blow you up. People living with me are strict...

Newcomers asked him:

– Don’t you sell tea, bread or anything edible?

“I only sell walls and roofs, for which I myself pay the swindler - the owner of this hole, the merchant of the 2nd guild Judas Petunnikov, five rubles a month,” Kuvald explained in a businesslike tone, “people come to me, unaccustomed to luxury... and if you I’m used to eating every day - there’s a tavern across the street. But it’s better if you, a wreck, unlearn this bad habit. After all, you’re not a gentleman, so what do you eat? Eat yourself!

For such speeches, delivered in an artificially stern tone, but always with laughing eyes, for his attentive attitude towards his guests, the captain enjoyed wide popularity among the city goli. It often happened that the captain's former client would appear at his yard, no longer torn and depressed, but in more or less decent appearance and with a cheerful face.

- Hello, your honor! How are you doing?

- Did not recognize?

- Did not recognize.

– Do you remember that I lived with you for about a month in the winter... when there was a raid and three people were taken away?

- W-well, brother, under my hospitable roof every now and then there are police!

- Oh, my God! Back then you showed the private bailiff a fig!

- Wait, you spit on memories and just say what you need?

– Would you like to accept a small treat from me? How I lived with you at that time, and you told me...

– Gratitude should be encouraged, my friend, because it is rare among people. You must be a nice fellow, and although I don’t remember you at all, I will go to the tavern with you with pleasure and drink to your successes in life with pleasure.

- Are you still the same - are you still joking?

- What else can you do while living among you Goryunov?

They walked. Sometimes the captain's former client, all unhinged and shaken by the treat, returned to the lodging house; the next day they treated themselves again, and one fine morning the former client woke up with the consciousness that he had drunk himself to the ground again.

- Your honor! That's it! Am I on your team again? What now?

“A position that cannot be boasted about, but, being in it, one should not whine,” the captain resonated. “You need, my friend, to be indifferent to everything, without spoiling your life with philosophy and without raising any questions.” Philosophizing is always stupid, philosophizing with a hangover is inexpressibly stupid. A hangover requires vodka, not remorse and gnashing of teeth... take care of your teeth, otherwise there will be nothing to hit you with. Here you go, here's two kopecks - go and bring a box of vodka, a patch of hot tripe or lung, a pound of bread and two cucumbers. When we are hungover, then we will weigh the situation...

The state of affairs was determined quite accurately two days later, when the captain did not have a penny of the three-ruble or five-ruble coin that he had in his pocket on the day the grateful client appeared.

- We've arrived! That's it! - said the captain. “Now that you and I, fool, have completely drunk ourselves, let’s try to take the path of sobriety and virtue again.” It is rightly said: if you do not sin, you will not repent; if you do not repent, you will not be saved. We have fulfilled the first, but it is useless to repent, let’s save ourselves straight away. Go to the river and work. If you can’t vouch for yourself, tell the contractor to keep your money, otherwise give it to me. When we accumulate capital, I will buy you pants and other things that you need so that you can pass for a decent person and a humble worker persecuted by fate. In good pants you can go far again. March!

The client went to hook on the river, laughing at the captain’s speeches. He vaguely understood their meaning, but he saw cheerful eyes before him, felt a cheerful spirit and knew that in the eloquent captain he had a hand that, if necessary, could support him.

And indeed, after a month or two of some kind of hard labor, the client, by the grace of the captain’s strict supervision of his behavior, had the material opportunity to again rise to a step above the place where he had fallen with the favorable participation of the same captain.

“W-well, my friend,” said Sledgehammer, critically examining the restored client, “we have pants and a jacket.” These are things of enormous significance - trust my experience. As long as I had decent pants, I played the role of a decent person in the city, but, damn it, as soon as my pants came off, I fell in people’s opinion and had to slide here out of town. People, my beautiful idiot, judge all things by their form, but the essence of things is inaccessible to them due to the innate stupidity of people. Get this off your chest and, having paid me at least half of your debt, go in peace, seek and may you find!

- I tell you, Aristide Fomich, how much am I worth? – the client inquired confusedly.

- A ruble and seven hryvnia... Now give me a ruble or seven hryvnia, and I’ll wait on you for the rest until you steal or earn more than what you now have.

- Thank you most humbly for your kindness! - says the touched client. - What a good fellow you are! right! Eh, in vain life has twisted you... What the hell were you in the right place?!

The captain cannot live without florid speeches.

- What do you mean - in its place? No one knows their real place in life, and each of us is not in our own way. The merchant Judas Petunnikov belongs in hard labor, but he walks the streets in broad daylight and even wants to build some kind of factory. Our teacher’s place is next to a good woman and among half a dozen guys, but he’s lying around in Vavilov’s tavern. Here you are - you go to look for a place as a footman or bellboy, and I see that your place in soldiers, because you are intelligent, resilient and understand discipline. Do you see what the thing is? Life shuffles us like cards, and only by chance - and then not for long - do we find ourselves in our place!

Sometimes such farewell conversations served as a preface to the continuation of the acquaintance, which again began with a good drink and again reached the point where the client got drunk and was amazed, the captain gave him revenge, and... both got drunk.

Such repetitions of the previous one did not spoil good relations between the parties. The teacher mentioned by the captain was precisely one of those clients who were repaired only to immediately collapse. In terms of his intellect, he was the man closest to the captain of all others, and perhaps it was precisely to this reason that he was obliged by the fact that, having descended to the lodgings, he could no longer rise.

The essay “Former People” was published in 1897, and it was based on Gorky’s youthful impressions, when the future writer was forced to live in a shelter on one of the outlying streets of Kazan from June to October 1885. The reality of the impressions determines the genre originality of the work: before We present an artistic essay, where the main subject of the image is the life of homeless people, tramps, “former people” at its final and, probably, most tragic stage. The essay genre presupposes underdeveloped plot lines, a lack of deep psychological analysis, a preference for portraiture to explore the inner world of the individual, and an almost complete absence of the characters’ backstory.

If the main subject of depiction in the physiological essay was not so much specific characters as the social roles of the heroes (a St. Petersburg janitor, a St. Petersburg organ grinder, Moscow merchants, officials, cab drivers), then in Gorky’s artistic essay the writer’s main attention is focused on the study of the characters of the heroes, united by their current social the situation of “former” people who found themselves at the bottom of their lives - in a shelter run by the same “former” person, retired captain Aristide Kuvalda.

In “Former People” there is no image of an autobiographical hero familiar to the writer - the narrator tries to distance himself from what is happening and not reveal his presence, therefore his ideological and compositional role here is different than in romantic stories or in the “Across Rus'” cycle. He is not the interlocutor of the heroes, their listener, and generally does not turn out to be a character in the work. Only the details of the portrait of “an absurd young man, nicknamed Sledgehammer Meteor” (“The guy was some kind of long-haired, with a stupid, high-cheekboned face, adorned with an upturned nose. He was wearing a blue blouse without a belt, and the rest of a straw hat stuck out on his head. His feet were bare.”) , and most importantly, the characteristics of his attitude towards others (“Then they got used to him and stopped noticing him. But he lived among them and noticed everything”) give us reason to see in him the features of an autobiographical hero, who, however, is distanced from the narrator.

But the main thing that distinguishes “Former People” from earlier stories is the author’s transition from a romantic interpretation of folk character to a realistic one.

The turn to realism also marks a change in the artistic means of comprehending reality.

If the romantic landscape in Gorky’s early stories emphasized the exclusivity of the characters’ characters, and the beauty and spirituality of the southern night, the vastness of the free steppe, the horror of the hopeless forest could serve as a backdrop for the revelation of a romantic hero who affirms his ideal at the cost of his own life, now the writer turns to a realistic landscape. He captures its anti-aesthetic features, the ugliness of the city outskirts; poverty, dullness, and cloudiness of the color scheme are intended to create a feeling of remoteness and abandonment of the habitat of the shelters: “The glass windows of the houses, dull green from age, look at each other with the eyes of cowardly swindlers. In the middle of the street, a winding track creeps up the mountain, maneuvering between deep ruts, washed out by the rains. Here and there there are heaps of rubble and various debris overgrown with weeds.” The description of the uninhabited house of the merchant Petunnikov and the lodging house, located in a former forge, set the context of the typical circumstances that shape the consciousness of the heroes.

Gorky is far from idealizing tramping. “In general, the Russian tramp,” he wrote in one of his letters, “is a more terrible phenomenon than I was able to say, this person is terrible first of all and most importantly - by his imperturbable despair, by the fact that he denies himself, casts himself out of life.” Indeed, the most terrible accusation that Gorky makes against the inhabitants of the shelter is complete indifference to themselves and passivity in relation to their own fate. “I am... a former person,” Aristide Sledgehammer proudly declares himself. “Now I don’t give a damn about everything and everyone... and my whole life for me is the mistress who abandoned me, for which I despise her.”

It is precisely this attitude to life, and not just their social position at its “bottom,” that “former people” are united by. Aristide Sledgehammer becomes their ideologist, and his philosophically helpless maxims represent the full outline of the ideology that a flophouse can create. “A former intellectual, he has one more feature,” wrote one of the first critics of the essay L. Nedolin, “he knows how to formulate those moods that nest in the heads of ordinary tramps, without finding expression for themselves.” Realizing the meaninglessness of complete self-denial (“As a former person, I I must humble within myself all the feelings and thoughts that were once mine... But what do I and all of you - what will we arm ourselves with if we throw away these feelings? some new ideology, which we are not able to articulate: “We need something different, different views on life, different feelings... we need something new... because we are new in life...”.

“Does it matter what you say and think,” asks the End. “We don’t have long to live... I’m forty, you’re fifty... there’s no one among us younger than thirty.” And even at twenty you won’t live such a life for long.” His laughter, “bad, corrosive to the soul” and infectious for his comrades, turns out to be the only possible emotional reaction to his own position in life, below which there is no longer anything. “The end says, as if hitting heads with a hammer:

All this is nonsense, dreams, nonsense!”

This despair was especially hateful to Gorky, who valued action in a person, the ability for personal growth, internal, hard, painstaking work of self-improvement. Therefore, the “continuously growing man” became the ideal of the writer. Despair gives rise to anger, which, finding no way out, falls upon one’s neighbor:

The conflict is clearly social in nature: “former people” led by Aristide Kuvalda are revealed in confrontation with the merchant Petunnikov and his son, an educated, strong, cold and intelligent representative of the second generation of the Russian bourgeoisie.

Gorky is interested not so much in the social aspect of the confrontation as in the heroes’ unwillingness to really comprehend their situation, their needs, and possible prospects. They are not interested in someone else's land on which the Petunnikovs built a house, or even in the money they expect to receive. This is just a spontaneous manifestation of the hatred of a poor drunkard towards a rich and hard-working person. Gorky characterizes the worldview of “former” people this way:

“Evil had a lot of attractions in the eyes of these people. It was the only weapon in terms of hand and strength. Each of them had long ago cultivated in himself a semi-conscious, vague feeling of acute hostility towards all people who were well-fed and not dressed in rags; each had this feeling in different degrees of its development.”

Gorky's essay shows the complete futility of such a life position. The complete absence of any creativity, activity, internal growth, dynamics of self-improvement (qualities so important for Gorky the artist and revealed in the hero of the autobiographical trilogy, in the novel “Mother”), the inability to oppose reality with anything other than anger, inevitably leads to the “bottom” and turns this anger against the “former” people themselves. Experiencing their defeat in the conflict, the heroes cannot comprehend it otherwise than in Sledgehammer’s maxim: “Yes, life is all against us, my brothers, scoundrels! And even when you spit in your neighbor’s face, the spit flies back into your own eyes.”